In VITA: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, João Biehl investigates life within Vita, an alternative community Porto Alegre, a region of southern Brazil where unwanted people find residence. Vita’s residents have typically been abandoned by their families due to poverty, mental illness, addiction, or physical disabilities. While Vita’s makeshift community seems to provide a solution for people who have nowhere else to turn, it lacks the necessary government funding and medical personnel to be successful. As a result, “Vita is the end-station on the road of poverty; it is the place where human beings go when they are no longer considered people” (Biehl 2).Through the detailed analysis of Catarina, the author explores life within “zones of
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Personhood is essential to social acceptance and recognition, and is a privilege that people lose when they leave their community center. In order to cure the country’s abandoned population, “an extension and a reflection of the country’s political-economic and domestic readjustments, zones of abandonment such as Vita emerge. . . . Before biological death, there comes their social death” (Biehl 52). Catarina was stripped from her role as a wife, mother, and member of her community when she became sick, “a leftover in a domestic world that was disassembling and reassembling in intricate interactions” …show more content…
“With the adoption of Brazil’s democratic constitution in 1988, health care had become a public right” yet people often died while waiting for attention at hospitals or local clinics (47). The poor citizens of Brazil experience structural violence through the government’s failure to provide them with basic needs such food, shelter, health care, and other human rights. Without her family, community, or government to support her through the disease, Catarina’s sense of self caused her to feel ex-human, “de facto terminally excluded from what counts as reality”
Personhood is essential to social acceptance and recognition, and is a privilege that people lose when they leave their community center. In order to cure the country’s abandoned population, “an extension and a reflection of the country’s political-economic and domestic readjustments, zones of abandonment such as Vita emerge. . . . Before biological death, there comes their social death” (Biehl 52). Catarina was stripped from her role as a wife, mother, and member of her community when she became sick, “a leftover in a domestic world that was disassembling and reassembling in intricate interactions” …show more content…
“With the adoption of Brazil’s democratic constitution in 1988, health care had become a public right” yet people often died while waiting for attention at hospitals or local clinics (47). The poor citizens of Brazil experience structural violence through the government’s failure to provide them with basic needs such food, shelter, health care, and other human rights. Without her family, community, or government to support her through the disease, Catarina’s sense of self caused her to feel ex-human, “de facto terminally excluded from what counts as reality”